Video cameras (or camcorders) are devices that are popular with amateur videographers for home use. Video cameras may be a digital camera, which stores digital video on a memory device, or an analog video camera, which stores video footage on magnetic videotape. Video footage captured by an analog video camera may be converted into digitized format using well-known techniques. This digital video may be processed using a software running on a computing devices (such as personal computers) to edit and manipulate the data captured by video cameras.
The traditional home digital video paradigm expects a user to shoot good video, perform tedious video editing, and then output a single large video containing the edited movie. One problem, however, with this paradigm is that raw video footage, even when professionally photographed, is difficult and tedious to edit. Professional editors with professional training and using high-end editing tools can take hour to edit raw video into a final version that is just minutes in duration. Moreover, most raw video footage is boring and poring over hours of raw video is quite a tedious task, especially for an amateur.
Yet another problem is that current video editing software for amateur use is modeled after professional editing systems. This tends to make the software difficult for the average consumer to use. User interfaces of current video editing software typically provide a user with one view of the raw video footage. A timeline is placed along side the footage to give the user temporal orientation. The timeline may include several different “tracks”, such as a video 1 track, a video 2 track, an audio 1 track, and so forth. The user interface includes controls similar to a VCR, such as play, fast-forward and rewind buttons. Using these buttons, a user browses the video footage by moving back and forth across the footage using the controls. This process of browsing the video footage is called “scrubbing”.
Still another problem is that current video editing software assumes that the output is yet another video, in which simple playback is the intended mode of viewing. Users may, however, wish to create other compositions with their video. These compositions include a two-dimensional layout of video that is analogous to a photo album, and a hyperlinked document in which the user chooses how to navigate the composition interactively.
Nevertheless, an amateur videographer often desires to produce nice, shorter video compositions of their longer, unedited raw video footage. The video composition may be, for example, a “highlights” video that contains the most interesting segments of the raw video footage, or a 2D video album, or an interactive hypertext document. However, the editing process of scrubbing the video to determine the location of cuts in the video footage is a tedious, repetitive and time-consuming task and must be performed manually. Thus, for the average consumer the process of editing video to produce a video composition is a difficult and burdensome task.
Accordingly, there exists a need for a video composition authoring system and method that provides an easy or an automatic production of arbitrary types of video compositions from digitized video without requiring a user to endure the editing process typically involved in producing such a composition.